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question:what-precisely-determines-the-borders-between-self-and-outside-world-in-multicellular-collectives

What precisely determines the borders between Self and outside world in multicellular collectives?

Foundational question about emergence of individuality in biological systems; central to understanding how collectives self-organize into discrete agents.

Source paper

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Collective intelligence: A unifying concept for integrating biology across scales and substrates

(2024) · Patrick McMillen · Michael Levin

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Claims (1)

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Collective intelligence exists on a spectrum across biology from cells to organisms
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Authors argue no sharp distinction exists between familiar animal cognition and collective behavior in cells/tissues; same principles apply across scales and substrates.

Related by similarity (8)

cosine ≥ 0.65 · no typed edge

Entities in the same semantic neighborhood but without a typed relation to this one — candidates for new edges or unrecognized duplicates.

What Determines The Boundary Between Individual Organisms Whenquestion0.802
What Determines The Boundaries And Scale Of Selfquestion0.792
The boundary between Self and World is not fixed and can change between generations and within a lifetime — this plasticity is fundamental to life's ability to survive, adapt, and exist as chimeric forms.claim0.775
Core biological claim about the plasticity of self-models, grounding the broader philosophical argument about identity and change
What is the boundary of self, given multiscale embodiments and overlapping ecological relationships?question0.767
Implicit throughout; answered by cognitive light cone and care-based demarcation rather than substance-based identity.
The collective often displays new behaviors or preferences that are not simply the sum of individual cell behaviors.claim0.764
Key property of collective intelligence: emergent behaviors at the group level.
What Constitutes The Boundaries Of An Individual Organismquestion0.753
What is the nature of the boundary between life and mind, and how does it scale across biological and artificial systems?question0.753
Central open question framing the paper's synthesis.
What is the boundary of self?question0.752

Cross-corpus bridges (2)

same_concept_as · Nomic cosine

External markdown files that talk about the same concept as this entity.

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What determines the boundary between individual organisms when cells can self-organize into multiple configurations?questions/what-determines-the-boundary-between-individual-organisms-when.md0.810
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How should we conceptualize the 'self' and individual boundaries in multicellular organisms?questions/how-should-we-conceptualize-the-self-and-individual.md0.800